Our current favourite thing? Our copy of Collecting Mania arrived two days ago, and we’ve only just had a chance to check it out. Peter Reichard of typosition.de and Christopher Lindlohr of loxodrome.de, who work together on the excellent Spatium Newsletter, set out to discover what creatives collect. 'What are you collecting and what does it mean for your creative work?,' they asked, and 80 people responded, designers, photographers, typographers and illustrators from 32 countries around the world.

The A4-sized book that has resulted is a beauty, a two-colour print job that is comprehensively illustrated by tantalising glimpses of the various collections. It’s also refreshing to find a print publication so saturated with exciting-looking URLs that it makes you hungry to type them in – rather than just be led by the nose through a series of hyperlinks (like I'm going to do now): extra-oomph, Richard May, santotipo.com (with lettering images from around the world), and many more.

There’s also a sense of a profession (designers in general) working extensively in an increasingly transient medium. Cataloguing work – collecting the ‘things’ that make up these designers’ working output – is hard. So pop culture artefacts and disposable products become totems: Francois Chalet and his collection of 'inflatable figures from all around the world', or Peter Himpel: 'I collect post-its (all memos I’ve ever written are lying in my drawers). God knows why I do this.' Most, if not all, of the featured collectors acknowledge their obsession. Daniel Knorn says of his incredible DDR Modell Autos site: 'of course, it’s a little insane to spend 250-300 Euro on some cars….' Happily for us, though, he did, as this is one of the most gorgeous toy-related websites I've ever seen.

I collect bookmarks. I have programmed a special database in which I put screenshots referring to the link. This is great, because websites design very fast or are designed newly. In this way I freeze their state – a kind of museum for websites. After a few years it surely will be interesting to click to screens from days gone.
Markus Remschied, h2d2.de, Frankfurt